William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

“What’s that meant to mean?”

“Some sort of covert surveillance thing you surprised. MI5. Anti-terrorist. I don’t know. He’s obviously well connected, your Chelsea Bridge bloke.”

“I’m not going to let this go.”

“OK — See that wall there? Just bash your head against it for an hour or two. You’ll get the picture. Leave it, Rita — it’s way, way over our pay-scale.”

She paced up and down the corridor, thinking.

“I miss you, Rita.”

“Tough.”

“I was a fool. Tosser. I admit it.”

“Too late, Gary.”

“We could have a drink, couldn’t we?”

♦

They went to a bar near the station — a pseudo-Spanish tapas place but with nice music. Gary continued his pleas to be forgiven and she half listened, still troubled by what had taken place, still angry in an unfocussed way, thinking back to what had happened the night before in that patch of waste ground by the bridge.

She’d gone straight to the clearing and had started searching, Joey and the other two shining torches here and there, when this man had reared up from behind a bush, giving her a shock, his hands raised above his head. “You got me,” was all he said. She searched him, found the weapons, arrested him and officially cautioned him, cuffed him and called the Chelsea boys for a couple of area cars. The man never said anything more, had no ID on him, wouldn’t give his name, was very calm. When she had pushed him into the back of the car he had turned to her suddenly as if he was about to say something before clearly stopping himself. Their faces had been close. Big, ugly bloke, weak chin with a deep cleft in it. Gary was still talking.

“Sorry, I was miles away,” she said. “So, what’s new? Any more Chelsea murders?”

“Not since your last rumble.”

“How’s it going?”

“About to close it down, I reckon — nothing, nada . Still got a murder room in Belgravia. Just a couple of DCs, a file and a phone line. For form’s sake, you know.”

“No sign of Kindred?”

He shrugged. “Kindred is either dead or being sheltered by friends and family.”

“I thought he had no friends or family in this country.”

“I reckon he topped himself.” Gary reached into his jacket pocket for a cigarette, then put the box back in his pocket, remembering he couldn’t smoke in pubs any more.

“You put out a reward like that,” he said, “that big — a hundred grand — you get a thousand calls. I think we got twenty-seven — all nutters. Then it dried up completely — he must be dead.”

“Or gone abroad,” she said. “Fled the country.”

He wasn’t interested, she could see. He reached for her hand. “I’d like to see you again, Rita. I miss you.”

♦

Rita climbed up the gangway to the Bellerophon , deliberately stamping her feet, and saw the glowing end of her father’s joint arc out from the stern into the water. He had a can of Speyhawk in his hand.

“Hi, Dad — nice and mellow?”

“I’ve been mellower, but I’m not complaining. Ernesto’s down below — you’re late.”

They had supper together — pizza, salad, apple pie — a monthly date that Rita insisted on and that they mostly kept. Once a month, she said, they should meet as a family and have a meal, share food and wine. She and Ernesto never talked about their mother, Jayne — Jeffs ex-wife — now living, as far as any of them knew, in Saskatchewan, Canada, re-married, to an unknown man, but Rita liked to think that the very fact that the rest of the Nashe family gathered together like this meant she was a ghostly presence — their pointed not-mentioning her making her all the more there, somehow. Rita wrote her a letter from time to time but she never replied — but she knew that Ernesto always received a card on his birthday and an occasional telephone call. But nothing for Rita, though, because Rita had chosen Jeff — Ernesto had been too young so he was forgiven. It was all misunderstandings and bad feelings and it made her sad if she thought about it too much: still, at least here the three of them were, having a meal.

“Busy, Ernesto?”Jeff Nashe asked his son.

“I could work fourteen days a week,” Ernesto said. He was a small, burly young man, two years younger than Rita. He looked like Jayne, Rita thought. He disguised his intense shyness under a badly assumed air of untroubled placidity.

“How’s the crane business going?” Jeff asked. “Soaring? Overarching?”

“When they’re building they need cranes. When they stop building we’re in trouble.”

Rita could see her father’s effort to feign interest. Ernesto was a tower-crane operator — he earned three times her salary.

“I arrested a man last night,” she said, keen to change the subject. “Down by Chelsea Bridge. He had two automatic pistols on him and a knife.”

Jeff Nashe turned his semi-befuddled gaze on her, eyes widening. “Are you armed-police, now?” he asked, accusingly. “The day you carry a weapon is the day you leave the Bellerophon .”

She ignored his idle threat. “He surrendered to me,” she said. “Me and my fellow officers.”

“You want to be careful,” Ernesto said. “Bloody hell, what’s it all coming to, eh? Jesus.”

“London’s been a violent city since it was founded,” Jeff said. “Why should we be surprised that anything’s changed.”

Fair enough, Rita thought, but, today, when we arrest a man carrying two unlicensed weapons on him we don’t let him go twenty-four hours later. She thought she shouldn’t just turn a blind eye and walk away — she really ought to do something about this.

DARREN BROUGHT THEIR PINTS over and set them down on the table. They were in a large, loud bar off Leicester Square — the place was full of foreigners, all chatting away in their incomprehensible foreign languages, Jonjo thought, looking around him. Even the bar staff were foreign. He, Darren and this other bloke who’d been introduced as ‘Bob’ seemed to be the only true-blue English present. This Bob was another soldier, Jonjo had recognised instantly, though of higher rank — an officer, a ‘Rupert’—but a Rupert who had seen some nasty business: two fingers were missing on his left hand and he had a fairly recent, wealed, crescent-shaped scar four inches long on his jaw.

“Cheers, dears,” Jonjo said and glugged three big mouthfuls of fizzy beer. He was in for a bollocking, or worse — might as well enjoy the free drink.

“You fucked up, Jonjo,” Bob said quietly, when he’d set his glass down. “Big time. Do you know what we had to do to get you out? Any idea who we had to call? The special favours we had to ask of very important people? What favours we now owe?”

Jonjo didn’t really care. Darren had told him he had every resource available so when he’d been arrested he made the call. What else was he meant to do? He smiled emptily back at ‘Bob’ and measured an inch of air between his thumb and forefinger. “I was that close,” he said. “I’d tracked Kindred down. I had him. Until that fucking policewoman showed up.”

“Malign fate,” Bob said. “The one thing you can’t calculate for.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Darren said nothing, concentrating on drinking his beer — the message-boy.

“Trouble is,” Bob went on, “now we can’t even tell the police you almost had him. That would tie us in to the Wang hit — so we’re taking it in every orifice.”

Jonjo ignored him. The worst was over. “I know what Kindred’s doing,” he said calmly, evenly, sitting back in his chair. “I figured it out while I was waiting for him. He’s been living there, by that bridge, for weeks…Just lying low. He’s not stupid: he doesn’t do anything, so there’s no trail. No cheques, no bills, no references, no mobile phone calls — only payphones — no credit cards, only cash — nothing. That’s how you disappear in the twenty-first century — you just refuse to take part in it. You live like a medieval peasant: you scrounge, you steal, you sleep under hedges. That’s why no one could find him — not even the whole fucking Metropolitan Police murder squad. He could be showing up on 30 °CCTV cameras a day but we don’t know. We don’t even know what he looks like any more, we don’t know where he goes, what he does. He’s just a man walking on a city street. Big deal. Free as a bird.”